Hardaway aiming for national impact

This is the stage Penny Hardaway wants at Memphis.

Excitement, anticipation and a sellout crowd for the biggest game the Tigers have played in years. That’s the setting for Saturday’s showdown with No. 3 Tennessee after a nearly sixyear break in the series.

“I can feel that the fans want this game as bad as we want it,” Hardaway said this week. “The Tennessee fans are bragging right now and sitting in a great spot ... deservedly so. They’ve earned that.”

Yes, they have. The schools are separated by 381 miles on Interstate 40 but in this matchup, the gap between the programs is much wider.

Rick Barnes has guided Tennessee (7-1) to its highest ranking in more than a decade. The Vols, then coached by Bruce Pearl, headed to Memphis in February 2008 ranked second in the nation and upset John Calipari’s top-ranked Tigers 66-62 in one of just five 1 vs. 2 regular-season showdowns in the 2000s. Those Vols rose to No. 1 two days after that big win.

Hardaway’s Tigers (5-4) are not there yet.

But simply hiring Hardaway last March to coach his alma mater has started reviving a Memphis program that had withered. Josh Pastner, Calipari’s successor, is credited — at least in Tennessee’s game notes — with ending the annual game.

Barnes worked with old friend Tubby Smith, Pastner’s replacement, to restart the rivalry. Tennessee and Memphis signed a threeyear contract that includes a game in Knoxville next season before meeting in the middle of the state in Nashville in 2020-21. But Memphis fired Smith in March with attendance and interest dwindling.

Saturday’s game will end the second-longest drought in a series that started in 1969. The series could once again have national implications under Barnes and Hardaway.

“I hope the atmosphere Saturday is as crazy as it’s ever been, as loud as it’s ever been and I’m going to be so hoarse that I can’t even do the media afterward,” Hardaway said.